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The Corpus of United States State Statutes--Design, Construction and
Use

15 Pages Posted: 28 Sep 2022

See all articles by Jesse Egbert

Jesse Egbert

Northern Arizona University

Margaret Wood

Northern Arizona University

Abstract

There is a need for more publicly available corpora of legal
language. To help fill this gap, we have developed the Corpus of U.S.
State Statutes, or CorUSSS, a new corpus comprising the statutory
code from all 50 U.S. states. In total the corpus contains 1,785,742
texts, each of which represents a statute in one of the 50 U.S.
states' codes. This corpus provides us with the ability to explore
language use in statutes within or across all 50 states. After
motivating the need for this corpus, we describe its design and the
methods we used to collect, clean and store the texts. We then report
on two case studies that illustrate the utility of this corpus for
addressing important questions in statutory interpretation. The first
case study investigates whether the word information can be used to
refer to statements that are non-factual. The second case study
addresses whether scooters are referred to as vehicles. We conclude
with a call for researchers in law and corpus linguistics to rely on
both legal and ordinary language when investigating questions of
interpretation.

Keywords: legal languagestatutory interpretationstatuteslegal
corporatextualism

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Egbert, Jesse and Wood, Margaret, The Corpus of United States State
Statutes--Design, Construction and Use. Available at SSRN: https://
ssrn.com/abstract=4232252
 

Jesse Egbert (Contact Author)

Northern Arizona University ( email )

PO Box 15066
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
United States

HOME PAGE: http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jae89/

Margaret Wood

Northern Arizona University ( email )

PO Box 15066
Flagstaff, AZ 86011
United States

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